Welcome to the Misadventures of Widowhood blog!

In January of 2012 my soul mate of 42 years passed away after nearly 12 years of living with severe disabilities due to a stroke. I survived the first year after Don’s death doing what most widows do---trying to make sense of my world turned upside down. The pain and heartache of loss, my dark humor, my sweetest memories and, yes, even my pity parties are well documented in this blog.

Now that I’m a "seasoned widow" the focus of my writing has changed. I’m still a widow looking through that lens but I’m also a woman searching for contentment, friends and a voice in my restless world. Some people say I have a quirky sense of humor that shows up from time to time in this blog. Others say I make some keen observations about life and growing older. I say I just write about whatever passes through my days---the good, bad and the ugly. Comments welcome and encouraged. Let's get a dialogue going! Jean

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

These past few weeks I’ve been driven and part of that is
because I’m feeling truly good physically for the first time in probably a year
and a half. This time last year I was getting ready for shoulder surgery. The painful
windup to that and the recovery afterward was long and difficult, given all the
restrictions that came with it---a winter of one-handed snow shoveling, not
lifting anything heavier than a fork. Also going on was the bottoming out of my
thyroid and the lethargic moods and weight gain that came with it. Once
discovered, then came the gradual building up of the hormone to where my latest
blood test two weeks ago said, “You’re there, let’s celebrate!” I’m back to walking every day
(until the snow flies). I’m back to eating healthy again (until the farmers
market closes). And I lost the weight I gained while my thyroid was wacked out and
I’m in serious downsizing mode.

With my mojo back and with any luck, I’ll be able to buy a
condo in the spring and I’ve found not one, but three online that are in my
target neighborhood and price range. They are zero-steps concept, just like my
house, and even though those condos will be gone by the time I’m serious about
moving it makes me happy that I won’t be looking for a needle in a haystack.
The baby-boomers have “arrived” and they are doing what they’ve done since
birth---driving the marketplace. Now, that means the building industry is
starting to build for aging in place. When we built this house in 2001,
zero-steps houses were as rare as unicorns. All I'm saying in these two
paragraphs is it feels like an adventure on the horizon and I’ll be ready for
it.

Speaking of adventure, can you imagine what it would be like
to do a 1,000 mile journey to explore the islands in the Great Lakes? This week
I went to a lecture featuring a woman who did just that---hiking, boating, kayaking
and biking around just a fraction of the 35,000 islands in the Great Lakes. (If
that number sounds high it’s because an island is defined as land that is at
least a square foot and has at least one tree and is surrounded by and above
water year around. Who knew!) The lecturer is in her fifties and did half the trip on her
own, the other half she took part in scientific research projects. I learned
a lot about my home state and saw a video presentation of beautiful, wild
places I never knew existed here. I have no desire to set rugged goals for
myself like Ms. Niewenhuis---this was her third 1,000 mile adventure---but I
bought her book all the same. She’s inspiring. She sets goals that scare and
challenges her, plans how to get from point A to point B and then has
confidence enough in her own abilities to carry it through. What’s not to like
about that? And once back home, she writes a book about her adventure while
planning her next one. On the way home I challenged myself to stop at the
nature trail to walk a couple of miles with a looming storm overhead even though I knew I’d be walking later that afternoon at
the sculpture park.

I went to the sculpture park for a book club like no other
that I’ve ever been to or heard about. The book discussed was Gail
Tsukiyama’s The Samurai’s Garden and
we met in the dry (Zen) garden for the first half hour, then in the wet (moss)
garden for the second half hour. In both places the lead horticulturist shared
his vast knowledge. The two types of gardens share elements of texture,
movement and the all-important use of negative space. The Zen garden, he said,
is a tool for concentration and is more for the gardener than those who come to
visit. There are twelve classic patterns they use to rack the crushed granite
and how the gardener gets out of our garden after completing his work is to hop
from boulder to boulder. The head librarian at the sculpture park’s research
library read passages from the book and asked questions. In the moss garden she read: “The garden
is a world filled with secrets. Slowly, I see more each day. The black pines
twist and turn to form graceful shapes, while the moss is a carpet of green
that invites you to sit by the pond. Even the stone lanterns, which dimly light
the way at night, allow you to see only so much. Matsu’s garden whispers at
you, never shouts; it leads you down a path hoping for more, as if everything
is seen, yet hidden. There’s a quiet beauty here I only hope I can capture on
canvas.”

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Before my husband and I met, he bought an old Victorian house
that had been split into four apartments that shared two bathrooms. He owned it
for more years than I like to remember because it was a lot of work to keep it up
and that’s not counting all the remodeling we did to add two more bathrooms
teaching ourselves plumbing, electrical wiring and sheetrock application along
the way. Once when we painted the outside we hired three 15-16 year old fatherless
boys to help and they ended up to be factors in an infamous fight that Don and
I had. They were kids from the neighborhood whose mothers---for various
reasons---didn’t pay a lot of attention to them. From the time they were 9-10
years old every time Don was outside working on a piece of equipment the boys would
be there watching and getting what we nicknamed their “Fifteen with Father”
talks. I can’t tell you how many times ‘the three musketeers’ would be in the
back of our yellow convertible being our shadows during Don’s and my early
years together. The beach, carnivals, car shows, music-in-the park, the rodeo and
the races---we introduced them to a lot of things they’d never done before.

Back to the Victorian house: One day we were all busy bees painting on the exterior when Don sent me to pick up lunch for the crew.
When I returned, I parked the car opposite the driveway. No big deal. It was a
busy city street and parking was at a premium. Later on, Don backed his truck
out of that driveway and hit my car. A normal person might have apologized. A
normal person might have taken in the fact that I was in a legal parking space
before he started chewing me out. “Why did you park there?” he yelled. “You
know you’re going to get nailed when you park opposite a driveway!” I pointed
out that HE was at fault for the accident---that I wasn’t even in the car. But
he still had a full head of steam and when I asked him why he was yelling he
waved his arm towards the teens who were watching the exchange and shouted, “To
teach these boys where not to park a vehicle!”

“That’s just great!” I was yelling by then, too. “All you managed
to teach them is it’s okay to yell at a woman for something you yourself did!
Is that really the lesson you want them to learn?” And just like that, the steam
left Don’s head and he got a look on his face akin to that of a little boy who’d
just got caught teasing an alley cat into a frenzy. Game. Set. Match. The
little woman won one for womankind when Don then told the boys that I was right
and “a guy shouldn’t take his frustrations out on a woman.” Don would have made
a good father. He wasn’t perfect but he was quick to admit when he was wrong
and he rarely forgot that the three musketeers were like sponges who took in everything
he said and did. He was a role model by default.

Change of topic: I have no plans to travel to Cuba but I
went to this month’s 'We Travel' event anyway. It was one on the most interesting hours
I’ve spent in a long time and before it was over I was longing to be the type
of person who is adventurous enough to sign up for trips like that. One of the
things I learned is that although the country has been recently opened up for travel
between the U.S. and Cuba, there are many regulations and restrictions on
who can go and why. People who have family there or who once lived there can go.
Journalists can get in if they engage in interviews on a daily basis and average
people, like those in the audience, can get in if they are take part in a program called People-to-People---cultural and educational exchanges. You have to sign a
contract that you’re going to interact with the Cubans each day from nine to
four and keep a journal of how much time you spent where and what you talked
about.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The Farmers Market is a crazy, good place. Even this late in
the season when---can you believe it---I saw my first Christmas commercial on
TV! It’s not even October yet but you’ve got to get those Christmas presents
put in lay-away, says K-mart. Hurry,
hurry before all the good stuff is gone! Back on topic: the vendors at the
market all must have produce coming out of their ears because Saturday they
were giving unadvertised freebies. One of them gave me two pounds of string
beans when I asked for one. The corn grower gave me ten ears of ‘peaches and
cream’ instead of six. The green pepper and tomatoes dealer doubled my order. I
smiled and thanked them all for their generosity, of course, but I can’t eat
that much produce! And the guilt of wasting food always weighs heavy on my mind---especially
now when there’s so many displaced and hungry refugees fleeing their war-torn homeland
on the news.

Solution: At seventy-something years old, and for the first
time in my life, I needed to learn how to blanch produce for the freezer. Pots,
pans, boiling water and ice water. How hard could it be? Turns, out it’s not
hard---just time consuming, especially if you count the part where you have to
clean up the kitchen afterward. I didn’t think I could blanch the dozen peaches
I came home with so I mashed them up like strawberries for shortcake. But I
didn’t have a plan or solution for the extra tomatoes. Decades ago, I helped my
mom make her famous chili sauce a few times but that was more complicated than
I wanted to get into, so instead I’m eating tomatoes morning, noon and night.
That’s a slight exaggeration but I did discover they taste good sprinkled with French’s Fried Onions. My mom’s favorite
way to eat fresh tomatoes was sprinkled with sugar, my husband liked them with
salt and pepper. I like them with McCormick
Bac’n Bites but I didn’t have any in the house. I thought about using the
dog’s Beggin Strips. They look like
bacon, they smell like (rancid) bacon but they have yellow dye #5 in them and I’m
allergic to that. Tonight I’m having a BLT for dinner made with bacon cheddar beer
bread from the Farmers Market. I might have to make one for the dog. He loves
everything that goes into BLTs. He’s very good about eating fruits and vegetables.

Monday morning is my make-a-trip-to-the-auction-house day. The
drive is about a half hour and it takes me through massive peach and apple
orchids. Their picking is well underway. Packing crates were stacked higher
than a house at several farms, ready to be transported to the canning plants. At
one of the corn fields I went by there was a combine parked and ready to start
cutting. It was old and probably paid for and it could only cut down four
rows of corn at a time. When Don and I would go to heavy equipment bone yards
to find parts for one of his three front-end loaders we’d run into farmers doing
the same for their various farm equipment.

Don could fix anything. One of my favorite memories involves
going to a bone yard where Don and the owner spent several hours stripping
parts off from an old Trojan loader while I sat in the truck reading. After Don
paid the guy, the man handed me thirty dollars and said, “Make this guy take
you out for dinner. You shouldn’t have rush to get a meal on the table after
keeping him company all day.” Little did the man know I didn’t cook and going to
a restaurant was a given. But the look on Don’s face when bills went from his
hands to the guy’s, then three tens given to me was priceless. We would have stopped
for hamburgers but I upgraded us to steak. When the owner of the bone yard
died, his tombstone made the newspaper. It was a large, marble bulldozer
and, of course, Don insisted that we had to go see it the next time we were down in that county.